Mr Obama also said that the MPs' rejection of airstrikes in Syria had influenced his decision not to enforce the “red line” he had drawn over the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons.

Bob Corker, the chairman of the US Senate foreign relations committee, said last month that Mr Obama was planning “a big, public reach-out” to convince voters in Britain to stay in the EU when they decide in the June 23 referendum, the newspaper said.

Members of the Leave campaign reacted angrily to Mr Obama's reported intervention.

“Why should President Obama tell the UK whether we should be part of a European superstate or a sovereign nation?" Peter Bone, a Conservative MP who is prominent in the Leave campaign, told the newspaper. "He should keep his comments, his views, to himself.”

Steve Baker, another prominent Conservative MP urging voters to leave the EU, added: “Whenever a US president intervenes in our constitutional future, I always reread the US Declaration of Independence. We will solve peacefully at the ballot box the problem for which their nation fought a bloody war of insurrection.

“I will take lessons from the US president when the US accepts a supreme court over its own, and free movement from Canada to Central America."